Anthropology is the only science whose subject matter encompasses humankind as a whole. This holistic approach has distinct advantages, but also brings unique challenges.
It has to hang somewhere on the tree of knowledge, so people typically classify anthropology as one of the social sciences. But it’s too holistic to fit neatly anywhere in our standard classification of disciplines. This strange study straddles the sciences and the humanities (As the science of humankind, how could it not?); while as science it encompasses both the biological and the social/cultural dimensions of our human being.
But anthropology’s holistic approach is more than a curriculum designer’s nightmare. As it became a genuinely theoretical science in the mid-twentieth-century (I’ll talk more about that later), anthropology (especially cultural anthropology) did so by participating in the major paradigm shift that was and still is sweeping all the sciences into a new configuration, a new dimension of knowledge, a new world-view of humankind in nature.
The hallmark of this new view is the shift from reductionism to holism—or at least the acceptance of holism as also valid and necessary—across all the sciences, and in much philosophy of science as well.
I don’t mean to say that everyone is on board here. Some people just like the established, “hard science,” linear logic of the reductionist program that Galileo and Descartes laid out about five centuries ago. This has been so even in anthropology, where the very nature of the discipline would seem to favour holistic perspectives. After all, the “hard science” programme has served us well in many respects.
But there’s another, almost instinctive, source of resistance, too. This shift to focussing on interconnection and whole system dynamics disquiets our cultural life. So much of how we live today still rests on earlier more simplistic ideas of the natural world and human society and relationships between them. Introducing notions of whole system dynamics, emergence, complexity and chaos into our existing cultural universe can be dizzying, turning things inside out and upside down, revealing gaps between what we now know and how we live that cause tensions and instability in politics, business, and many other aspects of life.
But science often does that. Always has. Today’s science demands that we face up to wholeness and interconnection just as the consequences of not doing so are becoming increasingly obvious and dire. And just as in times past people slowly and with much social turmoil came to terms with heliocentrism and evolution, so today we are slowly coming to terms with our inescapable embeddedness as but one element in a dynamic, complex web of living and non-living systems. More and more workers in various fields accept this shift in perspective, further it, and apply it in diverse venues.
The rise of systems theory as a formal discipline in the mid-twentieth-century perhaps most directly signals this shift of viewpoint. I’ll look further at this below. Meanwhile, anthropology’s original traditional focus on humankind in all its dimensions, all its levels of being—even despite resistance in some quarters of the discipline itself—gave it a unique place in the rise of systems theoretical understandings. Let’s begin there, with a quick review of anthropology’s four main sub-fields.
* * *
As a first step toward better appreciating anthropology’s unique place among the sciences, we can turn to another relatively new discipline. At about the same time as cultural anthropology stopped trying to model itself after Newtonian physics and was becoming a scie
nce in its own right, general systems theory came on the scene. (Systems theory more recently has grown offshoots known as chaos theory and complexity theory; and it itself, for the moment, seems to have faded into the background.
Systems theory makes an important distinction that we often ignore, that makes for clearer thinking in general, and, in particular, that throws anthropology’s unique place in the sciences into sharper relief. The distinction is that between abstract systems, and concrete or real systems. An abstract system is one that could not, in principle, exist by itself; a real or concrete system is one that in principle might exist by itself.
(To be fair, I should mention that some linguistic philosophers argue about that distinction; but those arguments are beyond me. In this case I find common sense more helpful.) Take a ball of wax as an analogy. The ball exists as a distinct thing in its own right. You can hold it your hand. You can throw it or kick it. You can see it rolling there on the ground or floating in the water. It also has various attributes: it is round, solid, of a certain consistency, mass, weight, and so on. In contrast to the ball itself, these are not things. They are abstract properties of the real ball. You can think “round” as an abstract idea; but you can’t have “round” by itself as a real, concrete, tangible object—it always is a characteristic or property of some thing (a ball, a ring, the Earth) that is real, and that also has other abstract properties, like a ball does.
Now, think of humankind itself as the whole ball of wax. All the other social sciences besides anthropology focus on abstract attributes or properties of human communities (actually, abstract systems because here we’re dealing with complex systems rather than with simple physical objects). Political science focuses on the political system; sociology focuses on the social system; economics focuses on the economy or the economic system; and some say that cultural anthropology focuses on “the culture” or the “cultural system” as an abstraction. But that’s just it! These are all abstract systems; they are abstractions. You can’t have, for instance, “an economy” apart from some real, concrete, human community that also has “a society” and “a political system,” just like you can’t have “roundness” as a thing in itself. Anthropology is the only discipline that focuses on humankind, or human communities, as real, concrete wholes with all their different and interrelated aspects and sub-parts.
You can see how our language leads us astray here. We carelessly refer to “the economy” in much the same way as we talk about “the ball,” or “the community”; but from the point of view of systems theory they’re apples and oranges—logically entirely different kinds of things. Everyday language lags behind new ways of thinking, much as our everyday practices and institutions do. Yet, at the same time, everyday language shapes our everyday thought and actions.
* * *
ANTHROPOLOGY’S FOUR FIELDS
Now, let me just quickly define anthropology as a field of study in terms of its different branches or subfields. Traditionally American anthropology has four main subfields: cultural anthropology, archeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. These subfields all come together in anthropology’s holistic approach. Graduate students take required courses in all the subfields, and specialize in one.
Cultural Anthropology is the study of different cultures around the world. It includes both ethnography (when the anthropologist goes and lives in a different culture and writes about what she or he observed), and ethnology (when anthropologists study ethnographies and make generalizations or theories about different cultures). 
Ethnology shades off into theoretical cultural anthropology, which involves thinking and writing about anthropological theory as such; and that in turn shades into what I call philosophical anthropology. Philosophical anthropology includes, on the one hand, what basically is philosophy of science with a focus on anthropology as science; and on the other it explores what the findings and theories of anthropology mean for the humanities.
Archeology is the study of human societies and cultures by means of excavating their remains. Tools, dwellings, settlements, buildings, trash heaps, and so on, buried deep in the past, and often deep in the earth or under more recent settlements, are all grist for the archeologist’s mill. Archeologist also have been known to look at our own modern dumpsites for insights or perspectives on contemporary Western culture.
Archeology’s main focus is material culture (in contrast to non-material culture—beliefs, rituals, organizations, and so on); and accordingly it has its own set of specialized tools and concepts. But in the end it aims to reconstruct past human cultures as wholes. It looks at past human cultures, just as the ethnographer or ethnologist looks at different contemporary cultures and cultural differences around the globe. It also looks at the broad sweep of human cultural development in different regions, and compares regions. In the end, archeology views its subject matter from the perspective of cultural theory just as cultural anthropology does.
Physical Anthropology focuses on the human animal as a physical being. It includes human anatomy, embryology, and genetics, as well as human evolution reconstructed through rare fossil remnants.
You can see how from a holistic or systems perspective it all begins to tie together. How does humankind’s physical evolution relate to our cultural evolution, and to the evolution of language? What was the role of our distinctive upright posture? How does the advent of culture relate to human population genetics? How did obvious racial differences arise, and how does what they are from strictly biological perspectives differ from the cultural meanings different groups assign to them? What can bone and teeth fragments from the earliest cities tell us about effects of the cultural transition to city life on human health?
Linguistics. The study of language and languages. Language is a very complex human phenomenon with varied aspects. Its study also, itself, therefore gives rise to a number of subfields. On the other hand, it also is a core part of what it means to be human, so linguistics as a field of study overlaps or is part of other disciplines. You might find courses in linguistics not just in anthropology departments, but elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities. Some aspects of linguistics also relate to the natural sciences, and to new fields such as cybernetics. But for all that, linguistics remains a core piece of the anthropology curriculum, and I think it’s fair to say that most linguistics is done and taught in anthropology departments.
Those are the main sub-fields; but then there are sub-sub-fields: political anthropology, social anthropology, economic anthropology, ecological anthropology, human evolution…. All these different sub-fields exert tremendous centrifugal force on anthropology; but anthropology’s particular genius as a discipline is to constantly exert centripetal counter-forces to pull them all back together. This genius resides in our focus not on abstractions, but rather on humankind as a real entity (or as comprised of real, whole entities), in relation to other real entities in our real natural world.